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The Role of the Voluntary Sector in Cross-sector Collaboration

This blog is written by Daniel Haslam, a Lecturer in Management in the Department for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise (PuLSE). Daniel also works in The Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership and studied for his PhD with The Open University.

This is the third blog I’ve written about my research. You can read an overview of the work here and some notes on how I analysed my data here.

This blog post focuses on one of the key findings in relation to the role of the voluntary sector within the Wellbeing Erewash project, an initiative set up in Derbyshire as part of NHS England’s New Care Models programme in 2014. Specifically, it will use the concept of ‘transmission belts’ (Albareda, 2018; Albareda and Braun, 2019) to explore how the main voluntary sector organisation involved acted as both a ‘route in’ to communities and a ‘voice for’ them and consider the tensions this role can create.

The voluntary sector as a ‘transmission belt’

My research found that the voluntary sector was used within the Wellbeing Erewash project as both a ‘route-in’ to communities and a ‘voice for’ them. The ‘route in’ involved working to enable access to communities and encouraging individuals to contribute to the project, mainly through aspects of what would broadly be termed ‘co-production’ (Brandsen and Pestoff, 2006). The ‘voice for’ came through in meetings and events for the project in which a representative from the sector was invited in order to give a voluntary sector – or at times a whole community - perspective on whatever was being discussed. This happened in spite of both voluntary sector and NHS workers pointing out that one person could not hope to represent the whole of the sector or the whole of the community.

Albareda (2018) describes a role for voluntary sector organisations working in an international EU context that involves both a focus on boosting ‘diverse participation’ and on ‘producing a consistent message’ across the sector. They use the term ‘transmission belt’ to describe this twin role. Table 1 displays how Albareda’s categories map across to those found in my research. Crucially, Albareda suggests that although public policy makers and organisations may covet the transmission belt as an ‘ideal type’, most voluntary sector organisations are unable to act in this way.

This is in many ways not a new tension for the voluntary sector as the unity/diversity debate is well-established in the literature (see Alcock, 2010; Milbourne, 2013). However, this interorganisational context created additional demands on the sector in light of their expected role. They were dealing with the tensions of acting as a transmission belt in addition to also grappling with the unity/diversity issue.

Table 1 – Albareda’s Transmission Belts as applied to this research

Albareda (2018) – twin demands placed on ‘transmission belt’ organisations:

This Research – how those organisations attempt to enact this in practice:

Boosting Diverse Participation

Acting as a ‘Route In’ to communities

Producing a Consistent Message

Acting as a ‘Voice For’ communities

Tensions for the sector

This is problematic as the voluntary sector is increasingly asked in UK public sector policy and practice to engage with the public sector as both a ‘route in’ and ‘voice for’ communities. In addition, in a UK austerity context, collaboration involving the voluntary sector is emphasised as a way to both improve outcomes for patients and reduce costs. In an NHS context, the voluntary sector is seen as a ‘key partner and enabler’ of service delivery (NHS, 2014).

The demands placed on the sector to act as a ‘transmission belt’ not only create tensions within organisations but can also lead to tensions with service users and others within communities in relation to who has the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the community itself. This amounts to the creation of competition between communities and organisations within collaborative settings. Such competition risks damaging the voluntary sector’s assumed ‘comparative advantage’ (Billis and Glennerster, 1998) over the public sector (their close links with communities).

Despite this risk, there is some evidence in my data that the voluntary sector was able to deal with these tensions without damaging relationships with service users and/or community members. However, further research on this is needed in order to draw any firm conclusions.

Implications for practice

There are also some key implications for practitioners that these findings suggest:

  1. Voluntary sector organisations need to consider whether they have the capacity, skills, relationships, and time to act as a ‘transmission belt’ in collaborations with the public sector;
  2. They also need to consider the impact on their relationships with service users and the wider community that this role can have and work to mitigate this;
  3. Public sector policy makers and organisations need to consider if they are asking too much of their voluntary sector partners and whether they are creating pressures on them to act in a certain way that is in turn impacting on their ability to deliver the expected benefits to any collaborative efforts.

For more information about my research please contact me: Daniel.haslam@open.ac.uk

References:

Albareda, A. (2018) 'Connecting Society and Policymakers? Conceptualizing and Measuring the Capacity of Civil Society Organizations to Act as Transmission Belts', Voluntas, Vol. 29, pp.1216-1232.

Albareda, A. and Braun, C. (2019) 'Organizing Transmission Belts: The Effect of Organizational Design on Interest Group Access to EU Policy-making', Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 468-485.

Alcock, P. (2010) 'Strategic unity: defining the third sector in the UK', Voluntary Sector Review, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 5-24.

Billis, D. and Glennerster, H. (1998) 'Human services and the voluntary sector: towards a theory of comparative advantage'. Journal of social policy, 27 (1). pp. 79-98.

Brandsen, T. and Pestoff, V. (2006) 'Co-production, the third sector and the delivery of public services', Public Management Review, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 493-501.

Milbourne, L. (2013) Voluntary Sector in Transition: Hard times or new opportunities? Bristol: Policy Press.

NHS (2014) Five Year Forward View, Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5yfv-web.pdf, (Accessed: 25 April 2016).

 

28th October 2019

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